Eye-tracking Vive VR headset headlines HTC's CES 2019 showcase

Bruce Glover |Wednesday, January 09, 2019

HTC Announces Vive Cosmos, A VR Headset That Can Seemingly be Powered by Your Phone

It's only recently that browsing the web in VR has ventured away from viewing your normal monitor through a headset, and now HTC Vive wants to push that even further by announcing several new collaborations. Last but not least the eye tracking helps allocate GPU time to where your eyes are focussed for sharper images where needed, and conserving GPU power where not. Dan O'Brien, HTCVive's GM of Americas, says the Vive Pro Eye came about because developers were asking to do more.

To the user, it's fine if a VR announcement doesn't apply to them at the moment. It capped off the event with the reveal of the Vive Cosmos, its next VR headset.

The new headset builds integrated eye tracking into the Vive Pro, making foveated rendering a built-in experience rather than a pricey add-on. That's right. This headset tracks your eye movements. I got to try out the game myself and the eye tracking worked pretty much as expected, though it was only available with the in-game menus - the gameplay itself still required a controller, which in this case was mounted on a plastic bat. The Cosmos should apparently work with more than just high-end gaming PCs, but no more details were shared about that. Other than that, the Vive Pro Eye has all the same specs that the Vive Pro does.

The Cosmos, which will run a new platform called "Vive Reality System", is meant to be a more approachable type of headset than what HTC has typically offered.

Announced by HTC stalwart Drew Bamford, who's now VP of Creative Labs within the brand, it promises to be the next step in virtual reality in terms of getting access to VR on the go - but right now, that's a mysterious promise.

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